Eager to Please (2009)

Oglio

To put it as plainly as possible, the Leftovers sound like an Elvis Costello-fronted Ramones cover band. If that doesn't sound appealing to you, you're not going to like them. If it does, you're going to love them, plain and simple.

Eager to Please, their second full-length and first for Oglio, is one hell of a pop-punk/power-pop record. The hooks are HUGE. There's keyboards, handclaps, and lots of "ooh"s and "ah"s in the background. The production sounds great and the guitars are crisp, clear, and pushed to the forefront. This just might be the catchiest pop-punk record of its time since the Ergs!'s DorkRockCorkRod.

The only downside I can think of is that the lyrics can be kind of one-dimensional. I was going to do an exact count of how many times the word "girl" appears on Eager to Please, but gave up when I got to 75 somewhere around halfway through the third song, "Girlfriend". The words "she" and "her" appear nearly as much. It might seem besides the point criticizing a pop-punk band for singing about girls, but a song or two about anything else would have been a welcome change of pace.

At a lean 36 minutes, Eager to Please doesn't overstay its welcome. It gets in, drops a ton of hooks, and gets out. If a slice of catchy power-pop is what you're after, get your hands on Eager to Please as soon as possible.